Bill Gates’ keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show
2008 revealed a rather startling statistic with regards to the
sales and acceptance performance of Windows Vista.

Gates told the audience that Windows Vista has sold more
than 100 million copies since the operating system’s launch in January
2007. When comparing pure numbers against Windows XP, which sold only 89 million
copies in its first year, Windows Vista appears to be a hit – but looking at
the big picture sheds a different sort of light on the matter.

With the PC market at nearly twice the size today as it was
in 2001, InformationWeek
surmises that Windows Vista captured around 39 percent of the new PC market in
its first year, while Windows XP managed to grab 67 percent of the new PC
market during its initial period.

The rather lukewarm response to Windows Vista must be
troubling for Microsoft. In response to customers with cold feet on the new OS,
Dell in April 2007 brought back the option
for its customers to choose Windows XP. Microsoft then took things another
step further by allowing
OEMs to downgrade Windows Vista Business and Ultimate installations to
Windows XP.

Office 2007 is maybe the best software release of 2007. For all its differences from earlier incarnations, everything is well-placed and intuitive. It took me all of 20 minutes to get used to Word, Excel and PowerPoint (the only portions I really use).

In the late '80s I bet you were saying something like "Why would I want a GUI? That would require massive re-training."

quote: Office 2007 is maybe the best software release of 2007. For all its differences from earlier incarnations, everything is well-placed and intuitive. It took me all of 20 minutes to get used to Word, Excel and PowerPoint (the only portions I really use).

For me it is the complete opposite. I think Office 2007 is far worse than 2003, and offers no real improvements. The functionality is the same, and the interface is a step backwards. I've spent so much time searching for things that should be obvious. For example, why isn't printing easily accessible in Word. Why do are there all sorts of options on the "ribbon" but nothing for printing?? You have to click on the Office logo (which apparently is a button) to even see that printing is a option. Seems foolish. Also, they adopted the "ribbon" for the big 3 applications, but continued to use the standard menu system for Outlook. Why?

quote: In the late '80s I bet you were saying something like "Why would I want a GUI? That would require massive re-training."

I'm all for new things, so long as they provide some sort of benefit. Microsoft has been pushing new Office versions for years that offer no improvements, but continue to provide funding for all of its other initiatives.

"So, I think the same thing of the music industry. They can't say that they're losing money, you know what I'm saying. They just probably don't have the same surplus that they had." -- Wu-Tang Clan founder RZA